EVENT: Meet the Philosopher

Michael Levine is Winthrop Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia. Recent publications include Integrity and the Fragile Self (co-authored), and Politics Most Unusual. Michael’s talk will address how East Asian and Indian aesthetics—particularly their accounts of the creative or artistic process in relation to a work of art—might give us additional insight and appreciation of Blanchflower’s work. Several non-western notions of artistic creativity will be discussed, including Taoism, which sees creativity as disciplined or structured spontaneity; Confucianism, which sees it as structured in terms of inherent principles; and Indian aesthetics, where the artistic process is seen as involving “emotion and insight informed by knowledge (jñana) of self and reality. Art is a kind of mimesis, an ‘imitation’ not of actual things, events or happenings but of the potentiality… of experience in its broadest and deepest terms.” (Eliot Deutsch)